Apologies that time seems to run ahead between these posts. I have only so many hours of comfortable productive sitting time each day, and I tend to spend them actually stitching, drafting/redacting new designs, and working on my books. Blogging often gets ignored.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. Far from it. I finished those two strips at the bottom of the Anything Could Happen sampler (the one honoring The Hungry Judges book by my Resident Male, itself still being written, too.).

Laying the roller bars out flat in the early morning light accounts for the shadows and non-parallel edges. In any case, two things remain – two panels at the top, one of which will be a duplicate of the blue one at the very bottom; and devising the little motifs that go at either end of the motto lines. Once I’ve identified those, drawn them up, and stitched them I can work the yellow step-voiding around them. I can say that one of those spaces will hold my initials and the year of completion.

Which brings us to the top panel. What to put there?

I wanted to continue with my theme of panels from the Azemmour Cluster. Paired birds are very common. I wrote about them a while back in this post. In the larger examples they usually face each other from either side of an urn that sports three plants or flowers. There’s also often a house-like structure with small resident creatures as the unit in between the pairs of birds. But those things aren’t set in stone. Sometimes trees appear, or other birds of various sizes. But one thing all of the bird panels big enough to bear it have, and that’s lots of “chaff” filling the main motifs. Smaller ones often have a token bit of filling, too, but sometimes they are just the bird outlines, with a tree or flower in between them, not quite as rounded and with fewer diagonal stitches than the paired bird panels of early modelbooks, but slightly echoic of them none the less.

Sadly they also tend to be of two sizes – either way too small north-south to fill my available space, or about a third to twice again as tall as the area I have to put them in. So since I wanted birds, I had to draft up my own.

I took inspiration from several of the bird strips in the prior post and tried to incorporate as much as I could of their iconography and general look-and-feel. So armed with my interpretation of the birds, I begin the top with that central urn. This strip will be voided in non-traditional purple to balance out the purple of the monsters strip. A departure, but true to the spirit of the design family, and (I hope) seen as a respectful tribute to the long standing tradition of Azemmour embroidery.